MASON, WILLIAM English poet, son of William Mason, vicar of Holy Trinity, Hull, was born on Feb. 12, 1725, was educated at St. John's college, Cambridge, and took holy orders. In 1744 he wrote Musaeus, a lament for Pope in imitation of Lycidas, and in 1749 through the influence of Thomas Gray he was elected a fellow of Pembroke college. He became a devoted friend and admirer of Gray, who addressed him as "Skroddles," and corrected the worst solecisms in his verses. In 1748 he published Isis, a poem directed against the supposed Jacobitism of the University of Oxford, which provoked Thomas Warton's Triumph of Isis. Mason wrote two plays in a pseudo classical style : Elfrida (1752) and Caractacus (1759), produced with some alterations at Covent Garden in 1772 and 1776 respec tively. Horace Walpole described Caractacus as "laboured, un interesting, and no more resembling the manners of Britons than of Japanese"; while Gray declared he had read the manuscript "not with pleasure only, but with emotion." Mason received
many preferments, including a canonry of York and a prebend of Driffield. When Gray died in 1771 he made Mason his literary executor. In the preparation of the Life and Letters of Gray, which appeared in 1774, he had much help from Horace Walpole, with whom he corresponded regularly until 1784, when Mason opposed Fox's India Bill, and offended Walpole by thrusting on him political advice unasked. The correspondence was not re newed until 1795. Mason died at Aston on April 7, 1797.
His poems were collected in 1764 and 1774, and an edition of his Works appeared' in 181I. His poems with a Life are included in Alex ander Chalmers's English Poets. His correspondence with Walpole was edited by J. Mitford in 185i ; and his correspondence with Gray by the same editor in 1853.